In 1220 Duke Henry I of Brabant gave the city a plain open square. What Antwerp built on it over the next seven centuries is the Grote Markt: a town hall of the 1560s, a ring of guildhalls that are mostly younger than they look, and a bronze Roman throwing a giant’s hand towards the river. The square started as the site of annual fairs, where English merchants traded with Italians, Spaniards and Germans, and became a permanent market as Antwerp grew into the most important city in the Low Countries.

The 2023 version of this page dated the square to the 16th century. That is the age of its best building, not of the square.

The town hall

The Stadhuis went up between 1561 and 1565, on the foundations of an older town hall that had burned down. Its main designer was Cornelis Floris de Vriendt, who mixed a Flemish building type with Italian Renaissance detail; about twenty years earlier the local architect Domien de Waghemakere had drawn a Gothic plan that was never built. The central section of the front carries statues of Justice, Prudence and the Virgin Mary, and the arms of the Duchy of Brabant, the Spanish Habsburgs and the Margraviate of Antwerp. The ground floor once held small shops.

It did not last long in its first form. During the Spanish Fury of 1576 the building was burnt to a shell; it was restored within three years. The interior visitors see is largely 19th century: renovations led by Pierre Bruno Bourla, Joseph Schadde and Pieter Jan August Dens roofed over the inner courtyard, and Henri Leys painted the murals of the hall that carries his name. UNESCO lists the building among the belfries of Belgium and France.

The latest renovation took almost four years and reopened the building on 18 June 2022. The design team, Huis van de Stad, had won a competition run by the Flemish Government Architect. Restorers re-hung the gold leather wallpaper in the mayor’s office, and the Leys paintings were cleaned only lightly, to avoid exposing old retouching. On the second floor, double-height rooms now let in daylight, and the artist Germaine Kruip set a mirrored sculpture into the central dome that reflects the sky and the tower. The most useful change is the plainest: the main entrance now opens from the Grote Markt instead of the Suikerrui, into a ground-floor hall used for public initiatives.

That was the right decision, and an overdue one: a town hall that the public enters from a side street is a town hall that has turned its back on its own square. The building is still the seat of the city’s government, and the full interior is shown on guided tours.

Brabo and the hand

In front of the town hall stands the Brabo fountain, 10.6 metres of stone and bronze by Jef Lambeaux, cast by the Compagnie des Bronzes in Brussels and inaugurated on 21 August 1887. It shows the legend of Silvius Brabo, the Roman captain who killed the giant Druon Antigoon. The giant took tolls from boatmen on the Scheldt and cut off the hand of anyone who refused to pay; Brabo cut off the giant’s hand in turn and threw it into the river, which some take as the origin of the name Antwerp.

Lambeaux built it as a pile. Rough rocks carry a pedestal; the headless giant lies at the base among a turtle, a dragon, a sea lion and fish; three mermaids hold up a ship topped by the three-towered fortress of the city’s coat of arms; and Brabo balances on one leg on top, in a pose Lambeaux took from Giambologna’s Mercury. A planned water basin was replaced by the rock formation in 1886. The fountain was restored in 1980 and protected as a monument in 1982.

Guildhalls, old and rebuilt

The guildhalls around the square belonged to the trades, each with its patron saint, but most of the façades are reconstructions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, modelled on paintings of the square by Flemish artists. The exception is number 7, the Sint-Joris guildhall, also called the Pand van Spanje, an intact 16th-century original with Saint George attacking the dragon. De Mouwe, also known as Het Cuypershuys, the coopers’ house, is home to the Antwerp Jazz Club.

Brussels took the opposite route to the same kind of square. After a French army of about 70,000 bombarded the city on 13 August 1695, only the stone shell of its town hall survived, and the guilds rebuilt the Grand-Place in about four years. Antwerp’s guildhalls were rebuilt slowly, two centuries later, from pictures.

The square in winter

The square’s biggest crowds come in December. Winter in Antwerpen, the city’s Christmas programme, drew 1.5 million visitors over four weeks in 2025 to 2026, 170,000 of them on the opening weekend. The Grote Markt had the Christmas market, a wish tree that collected more than 2,600 wishes and a main tree hung with 1.2 kilometres of lights; the covered ice rink, 1,000 square metres, was on the Groenplaats. Mayor Els van Doesburg said the event had “shone brighter than ever”. One in four stallholders came from Antwerp, and the largest group of foreign visitors from the Netherlands.

The city has set the next edition for 4 December 2026 to 3 January 2027, with stalls again on the Grote Markt, the Suikerrui, the Groenplaats, the Handschoenmarkt and the Operaplein. In summer the square is quieter, and Visit Antwerpen recommends it for the carillon concerts. Brabo, meanwhile, is still about to throw.